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Congress pushes Trump to get tough on Idlib

Congress is calling on the State Department to get tougher on calling out reported Syrian war crimes as forces loyal to the Bashar al-Assad regime attempt to advance deeper into Idlib, one of the opposition’s last holdouts in the war-torn country.
U.S. President Donald Trump shows maps of Syria and Iraq depicting the size of the "ISIS physical caliphate" as he speaks to workers while touring the Lima Army Tank Plant (LATP) Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, the country's only remaining tank manufacturing plant, in Lima, Ohio, U.S., March 20, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Barria - RC139DF142F0

Even as the Donald Trump administration has taken a mostly hands-off approach to the surge in fighting in Idlib, one of Syria’s last remaining opposition holdouts against the Bashar al-Assad regime, Congress is pushing the State Department to get tougher on reported war crimes in the contested province.

In a letter Tuesday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the US ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, Reps. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Adam Kinzinger, D-Ill., both of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and 19 other members of Congress urged the administration to call out three pro-regime strikes in Idlib in July and August that the UN says killed at least 17 civilians and injured 54.

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